Gordon Campbell on the Labour Party ructions

One of the credibility
problems for the Labour Party is that the party
membership is considerably to the left of both David
Cunliffe and David Shearer. In that sense,Cunliffe’s
articulate speeches earlier this year and Shearer’s
heartfelt pitch to the party conference on the weekend were
both projections into a political space that neither of them
comfortably inhabit. Therefore, once normal political
activity resumes, Shearer could well revert to previous
settings – whereby, in line with an MMP division of
labour, most of the heavy lifting on the left is done by the
likely coalition partner (the Greens) while Labour seeks to
occupy the non-threatening political centre.

For all
that, Shearer emerged from the party conference far stronger
than he went in. If he has at times during 2012 looked like
this generation’s Bill Rowling – a nice guy out of his
depth – he delivered a conference combo of housing policy
strongly in tune with party tradition, and a rousing final
speech that re-stated the party’s convictions with genuine
heat. Like Jim Bolger, Shearer could be one of those
politicians who is at his best only when his back is right
up against the wall.

If so, Shearer will have plenty of
opportunity to show his mettle over the coming weeks and
months. At the party conference,Labour adopted a new formula
for triggering a leadership challenge. As Chris Trotter
pointed out on RNZ this morning, this move was a rebuke to
the way the caucus had trampled all over party sentiment
last year in its choice of Shearer as leader. Having invited
the party to express a preference, the caucus then ignored
it. If a leadership vote was held in February 2013 and with
significant input from beyond the parliamentary caucus, it
could well see Shearer replaced by Cunliffe. In line with
the old maxim that nothing focuses the mind quite like the
prospect of imminent execution, Shearer’s supporters have
immediately floated plans to bring forward the vote.
Unfortunately, an early vote under the old rules would run
the obvious risk of being a Pyrrhic victory, motivated
mainly by self interest on Shearer’s part – and it would
hardly be in the spirit of democratization that the
conference has just endorsed.

Cunliffe, wisely, has
chosen the tactics of asymmetric warfare – which entails
pledging support for now, while keeping options open for a
contest on grounds more to his liking. Clearly, Team Shearer
would prefer a premature burial for Cunliffe to avoid the
leadership question festering over the summer – but it may
do so, regardless. And so it should. Because if Shearer does
not feel confident that he can hold his own party together
behind him and win a vote in February, what chance does he
have of convincing the entire country in 2014? An early
vote, whichever way you try to dress it up, would be a sign
of weakness on Shearer’s part.

One can feel some
sympathy for Shearer’s predicament. He was elected leader
less than a year ago. As Matt McCarten pointed out on the
weekend, under Shearer’s leadership Labour has closed the
gap on National by ten percentage points, and the opposition
grouping of Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First is now
consistently leading the governing coalition in the polls.
(That reliance on NZ First is probably illusory, and could
well turn today’s lead into a mirage, come 2014.) True,
John Key remains the country’s most popular politician and
its most skilled communicator – which should make
Shearer’s inroads as Leader of the Opposition seem all the
more noteworthy. Moreover, as McCarten and others have
argued, while activists and commentators may feel impatient
with Shearer’s tentative style, his personal poll ratings
are still streets ahead of what Helen Clark was achieving at
a similar point as leader.

All these rational arguments
have been eclipsed by the conflict with Cunliffe who –
like it or not – is able to articulate Labour’s
positions clearly and forcefully in a way that Shearer
usually struggles to match. There is a sense that Cunliffe
has tacked left within a centrist Labour Party in order to
locate a convenient source of support – but in doing so,
he has tapped a level of genuine frustration within the
party, and he pulled Shearer leftwards on the weekend. For
that alone, Labour should be grateful for Cunliffe’s
efforts. It is all very well to talk about the need for
unity, but a unity that merely wallpapers over the party’s
real divisions is simply a cosmetic job done for the benefit
of the media, and it will not last. Either Labour has to
choose to become a genuine party of the left again and
contest the entire spectrum of centre left issues
effectively with the Greens – or the party rank and file
will need to fully and consciously embrace an MMP logic
whereby a Shearer-led party positions itself deliberately in
the fuzzy centre and willingly cedes the party’s
traditional ground to the Greens, with all of the patience
and discipline that this will require. It can’t do both
things at once.

While it works out its identity crisis,
Labour’s front bench can ill afford to lose Cunliffe.
Shearer and his team have struggled all year to get traction
on the government, especially in comparison to the Greens
who are routinely faster off the mark, with a far more
pointed message. (That’s the advantage of not having to
second-guess your own instincts.) At the same time and quite
perversely, Labour MP Shane Jones has been allowed by
Shearer to repeatedly run amuck across the portfolio domains
of his colleagues to launch attacks on the one coalition
partner that Labour plainly needs in order to govern. That
nonsense has to be stopped.

Given these rather more
deep-seated problems, it could be argued that shuffling the
leadership deck would be only a cosmetic fix. There’s some
truth to that. (The strategic positioning of the party in an
MMP environment is a far more critical issue in need of
consensus.) Even so, if in February – or even as late as
May, after three months of parliamentary combat - Labour
emerged with either a newly minted leader in Cunliffe or a
strongly mandated one in Shearer, it would give the party
fresh momentum just when the Key government will be heading
into trouble again, over the legal status of its asset sales
programme.

This re-birthing process cannot be avoided for
the sake of some short term show of “unity’ staged to
please the political pundits. Of late, Labour has been led
by someone who cannot manage either his party’s best
talent or the rogue elements within his own caucus –
while the alternative option as leader seems to be deeply
resented by many of the senior Labour MPs. Too bad for the
party faithful. Evidently, they will need to wait a little
while longer for a leadership that’s able to get really
tough on John Key, rather than on its own dissatisfied
elements.

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